There is a pop, followed by a high-pitched whistle: the tires, slashed.
The beginnings of panic around you. You get up, head toward the door, signal to the driver to open it for you.
‘I’ll talk to them.’
Your skin gives you strength. They won’t hurt you. You’re white.
But from the hordes at the gas station, someone shouts. A woman.
‘Let’s burn them niggers!’
You turn toward the source of the shout. You look each other up and down through the window. She may be forty. Two young kids hang on her skirt. She is pretty. She shouts again.
‘Kill them nigger lovers!’
That’s when you start to understand the small crowd. Revealed by this maternal voice. Her shout a carbon copy of the reality forming in front of you: men, women, and children. Armed. With crowbars. Hammers. Pickaxes.
The five ghosts from the KKK have joined the agitated group. An anonymous hand emerges from a white robe to light a torch.
The gas tank explodes. Screams of panic. Smoke quickly fills the space. You are choking. But they are waiting for you outside.
You close your eyes and grope your way to the front.
Selena grabs on to you like a child. You push her to the floor. Where you can still breathe. The front door opens. You spill out.
Thick air greets you. You swallow it like someone who is thirsty. Still blinded by the smoke, you can’t make out what’s around you.
Then, roaring in the soft light of the spring, the horde pounces on you.
‘Kill them nigger lovers!’
Slim calves, a bandage on a knee. Untied shoelaces. A child bashes you on the neck with a stick.
You go down.
A silhouette is running between the scattered bodies. It doesn’t move like the others. It is floating, stopping at the feet of every fallen body. It offers water from a bottle that is already almost empty. It draws closer to you, bends over, scared. Blond hair sticks to the damp face. She is six or seven years old. Terror is stamped on her face. As you swallow the few lifesaving drops, you tell yourself that she will never be free of it. That forevermore she will be disfigured by this day.
She is off, jumping nervously from body to body, finding a bit of balance while she offers a gulp.
Suddenly, a deep voice. An appeal.
‘Okay. That’s enough now. You’ve had your fun.’
From his horse, his voice carried by the megaphone, a policeman finally calls for calm.
And slowly, obediently, the crowd disperses.
A few minutes later, only your group is left.
You survey the scene. A shower of broken bodies, crumpled on the ground, in the light of the setting sun.
Selena is in the fetal position. Slowly she catches her breath. Then, with an unhurried, expansive movement, she unfolds toward the sky. She gets up, splitting the horizon. Ready to carry on.
So you get up too.
You tear yourself off the ground, although your outline remains, an affront to the well-tended lawn.
The carcass of the bus is still smoking at the side of the road. You have nowhere to go.
You advance as one, without touching one another, cutting through the hypocritical suburb that pretends not to see you, a slaughtered group of people dragging their heels, nervously looking behind them, fearing an ambush.
You need to find somewhere to sleep.
The houses grow fewer and farther between, and their absence comforts you.
A large house stands alone on the side of the road. It is different from the others somehow. It is rickety and asymmetrical, which makes it seem less hostile.
You knock on the door. Selena and Farmer go with you.
A thin man in a bathrobe opens the door a crack.
‘We’ve been attacked.’
The man gives you a quick once-over. You feel him hesitating. He looks at the group waiting behind you. He is afraid. But he asks you to come in.
You are squeezed into the living room, a close-knit group that can’t quite fill the space, even though there is plenty of it and it’s comfortable.
The man seems to have disappeared. His wife, slim and elegant in silk pyjamas, puts the contents of her medicine cabinet at your disposal so you can bandage your wounds.
She hands out tomato sandwiches, then sits down beside you.
She had heard about you. About your bus. She knows what happened.
She is intelligent. You know it. You feel it.
She talks to you in a soft, maternal voice. Tells you that you shouldn’t come here upsetting things. That you are making a mistake.
‘The niggers, you know, we like them … We get along … ’
It’s a good sandwich. Predictable and reassuring. You eat it and ask for another. There are family photos on the walls around you. You count four children. Vacation smiles, graduation smiles, wedding smiles.
Happy smiles marking an ordinary life.
And suddenly, you ask if you can make a call.
The telephone is sitting on a small bedside table. You sit on the edge of the bed. On one of the large pink flowers that adorn the quilt. The woman, who is sensitive, smiles at you and closes the door behind her.
You dial. You expect to get one of the Barbeau sisters. Pauline or Janine, whom you mix up anyway. But Mousse answers. Her voice is making its way from childhood to adulthood. Why isn’t she at school?
It’s the first thing you say to her.
A fraction of you is still intact, a maternal part salvaged.
At the other end of the line, time like a chasm.
‘Mommy?’
You don’t know how to answer that question.
So Mousse throws herself into this special moment.
She speaks slowly and draws out her words to make her story last a lifetime.
No, she’s not at school. She has a fever. Yesterday she went to the movies with a boy. He put his thumb in her mouth. He touched her tongue. She liked it. Then he got closer to her. He smelled good. The salted butter from warm popcorn. And he kissed her, on the mouth, for a long time. She came back home. In love and with a fever. That’s why she isn’t at school.
Sitting on a large flowery bed. An ordinary mother.
You hear Mousse’s smile. She continues her story so as not to lose you again. She tells you that since the kiss, her hair has gone curly. She asks you whether yours gets curly too.
Someone knocks at the door. It’s Farmer. He has to make a call. It’s urgent.
You lie to Mousse and tell her yes. Yours gets curly too.
You hang up and you die a little.
Farmer spends hours on the phone. He is doing his best to reach the other bus. No one knows whether it kept going. Whether it made it across Alabama. Whether it is sitting somewhere in ashes.
You will get your answer the next day, when you join the rest of the troops, crammed together in the jail in Jackson, Mississippi.
The police are at the door.
You are arrested for disorderly conduct.
There are eight of you in a cell for two.
The Whites have been separated from the Blacks, locked up at opposite ends of the jail.
One by one, they come get you. Strip-search you.
In an empty, cold room, a pair of gloved hands penetrates you. You stare at the concrete wall that is holding you up. You hang on to its bumps. Its short cracks, its craters. Small dried-up lakes. Like on the moon. You settle into them while a strange hand searches inside you.
The search is over. You wipe the Vaseline left between your legs with the back of your hand. You turn to face the young woman with fine features who stares at you in disdain. She takes you back to your cell and shoves you hard into those who have become your people.
Now you understand that worse than the Blacks are those who like them. Dirty Whites, and you are one of them.
On the floor is a carpet of newspapers. The sheets pile up under your feet, then under your slumped, crammed bodies. Ne
ws from America.
Hours pass during which you can’t guess what will happen next.
Then metal dishes are handed around, a gruel of cooked vegetables congealing in them. You are so hungry.
You sleep entangled. You are assaulted by the smell of rancid breath.
Days and nights go by without you being able to wash.
You don’t talk anymore to avoid smelling each other.
You all hear wailing from the other end of the jail. Or maybe you are the only one who hears it.
One night, you dream of Mousse.
She has breasts. Two little breasts poking through her Donald Duck T-shirt. You wake up with a start.
You throw up in a corner. You call for Selena, with what voice you have left. But no one comes. You end up curling up and think, in that moment, that you could finish dying.
You hardly talk anymore, or only when looking at the ground. Like when you were little and you walked with your head bent over the new shoes your father had given you. You are once again thrown into that place where there is no horizon.
A crash: a wall explodes, a pyrotechnic woman races across the damp hall. She slows down as she gets to you. She casts a crazed look your way. It electrifies you. Hilda Strike, a blazing fantasy continuing her never-ending race, quenching your thirst. You watch her as she disappears.
And you keep your head up.
Then, at the end of the hall, steps. It’s unexpected. They come closer and pass by you. Ten, eleven, twelve … Whites and Blacks. They are marching, loyal and proud. They advance, making the sign of victory with their fingers barely hidden in their empty pockets.
Your vacant bodies, suspended, let them go by and disappear. A fleeting, mysterious apparition.
But a few hours later, it happens again.
Around fifteen young people, the smell of victory in their wake.
Then you understand. That the tide has turned. That now they are arriving in waves, Blacks and Whites, coming from across America, to encourage you. To split the walls of Parchman, which is gradually filling up.
And for the first time in your life, you feel like someone.
They would have done it without you. They would have won without you. But at that point in your life, you needed them. And, maybe, they needed you a little.
On August 28, 1961, three hundred new demonstrators were jailed in Parchman.
On September 22, 1961, the Kennedy administration ordered the release of detainees in the prison that was bursting at the seams, at the same time as he declared the use of segregationist signs Colored and Whites Only illegal.
From your little office in the heart of Greenwich Village, you finish drafting a pamphlet encouraging activists and politicians to join a demonstration two days later. Your fingers fly over the typewriter, graceful despite the routine.
You are a secretary for an activist association. For the first time in a long while, you have habits. Your black boots, your lipstick, your two morning coffees.
You are celebrating your fortieth birthday today. You don’t tell anyone. Selena knows and calls you from the hospital room where she has just given birth to her first child. A boy, born the same day as you; she wants you to meet him.
You will go. Not so much to see him as to see her, filled with milk and armed with new power and vulnerability.
You leave the office and make a detour to the liquor store to buy a bottle of champagne.
There is a young man in front of the store. Sitting on the ground, his back resting against a public bench, his head between his knees and his hand out.
There are plenty just like him in New York. But something about him speaks to you. Maybe his stillness. It seems almost fake, rigid in the midst of staccato steps. Only the slight trembling of his hand gives away the life inside him.
You go in. You choose the finest champagne. And you pass by him again, avoiding looking at him. Convinced, this time, that he is looking at you too.
A quick stop at your apartment on the third floor of an old building in Manhattan.
You put on some music. ‘My Guy,’ by Mary Wells.
You dance while you’re changing.
The phone rings. It’s your sister, Claire. Her voice hesitates as the cheerful music reaches her ears.
‘Mom is dead.’
In your mind, your mother is your age. You want to see her old. You want to see her dead. You desperately need that finality.
‘I’ll come.’
You head to the hospital.
Climb the steps to the maternity ward. Push on the glass doors.
But you are more of an alien amid the mothers than amid the Blacks, and you won’t go in.
This is where you abandon Selena, who will live without you now. She is becoming a mother, whereas you are becoming an orphan.
You turn on your heels.
You crisscross the city, a dry crater in your chest.
You don’t need anyone. But the ground already feels shakier under your feet.
You find yourself in front of him. The young, still man. Fossilized. He is sleeping stretched out on the bench. His hands, which move you, still have a tremor.
You sit down beside him. He opens his eyes and stares at you. His face is impassive, and his eyes grab on to you.
He must be twenty years old. An urge bubbles to the surface to take him and rock him. You smile at him. You take the bottle out of your bag; you open it and hold it out to him. The golden foam runs over his hands, which finally stop moving, grabbing on to the lifeline you are holding out to him.
He drinks.
You tell him it’s your birthday. He drinks again. He wishes you a happy birthday and introduces himself. Gary.
He will be the third man in your life. And the last.
1965–1974
Summer 1964, Journal of Corporal Adams (Excerpts)
The night was thick. I had slugs in my shoes. They were squished between my toes. I had stopped removing them, I was so used to their soft, wet presence. I even surprised myself by talking to them. Asking them what they thought. They were part of my platoon. The guys thought it was funny, and they nicknamed me the Worm Man.
We had just dispersed, fanning out along a narrow perimeter of jungle. We were still in the free fire zone. In other words, anyone who lived there was considered the enemy.
I arrived about two months ago. Time had become disjointed. The jungle was getting inside me, in my blood, in my saliva, in my shit. It was eating me.
I wanted to be here. I wanted to sweat, I had dreamed of shooting, as an absolute, without connecting it to the idea of life or death. I wanted to do something. That was all. I wanted to be in my body and make it useful.
And now, I was casually letting myself disappear. I was getting blurred. Disembodied.
He emerged from the nighttime fog. Stumpy legs. Out of breath. I remember the rhythm of his shoulders, which reached toward the sky and then sank to the ground. Again. Again. Again. I don’t know how long we stayed that way, looking at each other. But suddenly he lifted his arm toward me, splitting the sky. His arm seemed too long. He screamed. It was his voice that got me right in the stomach. It was like mine. It is strange to hear yourself scream.
So I fired. A hail of bullets. He fell. Got back up again. And he sunk into the night. I ran. I couldn’t see him anymore. But I could smell him. My mouth started to water. The mouth of a predator. He couldn’t escape me. We were like magnets.
My running was calculated and muffled, splitting the thick jungle. I had a goal: him.
The forest suddenly disappeared. It opened up under the indigo sky. I could see only dark shapes I had narrowly avoided as I chased my prey.
Who was there, available and vulnerable, standing in front of me.
I had spotted him. I can even say that I looked at him. He was handsome. He had wide, dark eyes. Sunken cheeks and thick lips. He whispered something to me in Vietnamese.
And I fired. Into his stomach. Twice. He fell to his knees, gently. He sunk
into the ground. In slow motion. He stayed like that for a moment. Kneeling, just looking at me. He was already dead, I think. But he didn’t collapse. He wasn’t surrendering. He stayed facing me, frozen in his savage dignity.
I would have liked him to fall. To surrender. To stop looking at me.
I approached him. I put my hand on his shoulder. It was thin, delicate. I pushed him. He slowly slid to the ground, face down.
I was finally able to lift my head. And I saw the village. The few scattered houses, outlined against the night.
The bodies creating stripes in space. Human stalactites hung from the trees, from the cornices, from the stars. Tens of hanging bodies. Raining down from the sky.
He had come to die with his people. He had run until he was underneath their absence like a blazing meteorite, holding back his fall until the end.
I think the wind came up, making the ropes around their necks swing. Like heavy pendulums, they marked the end of my world.
I collapsed on the ground.
I didn’t move. For hours, maybe days.
Until my convoy found me, my body curled around my prey.
They sent me home. Back to my country, a ‘Return to sender’ label around my neck.
Gary Adams – Age 22
The door of the funeral home opens onto a generalized murmur, which you face, holding Gary’s hand. He trembles less when he holds on to you.
You split the small crowd and eyes look you up and down. You go stand in front of your dead mother.
You haven’t seen her in twenty-two years. She looks less severe than in your memory of her. Her prominent cheekbones dominate her face, casting their shadow on her hollow cheeks.
She is wearing lipstick. You had never seen her in makeup. You quickly remove it. You rub her thin lips with your fingertip.
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